Managing IP Telephony

What are the reasons and benefits for this? Robin Gareiss from Nemertes Research discusses third-party management in more detail.

IP telephony promises a number of benefits to the user, as it is a multi-service network that can give enterprises an affordable way to simplify and streamline their communication systems. Converged IP networks can offer the benefits of cost saving and adding advanced applications. Business communications collaborations become easier, including unified messaging, virtual call centers and interactive voice response, which all serve to streamline an enterprise’s operations and improve business communications. Video conferencing is one of the technology’s most popular facets, adding a personal touch to long distance business relationships. Considering all the benefits, for many businesses, the decision to switch to IP telephony is a relatively easy one. Inevitably these enterprises start off trying to manage their IP telephony internally. So why change to use a third-party management solution?

Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, has some ideas: “Initially when companies go to IP telephony they don’t really think about management tools at all. What they tend to think is that their IP PBX vendor can provide them with everything they need, or that their existing management tools will work just fine. But after about 18 months to two years of using IP telephony that’s when we start seeing companies looking to outside sources for help.”

What changes to persuade enterprises to look for outside assistance? A company’s initial use of IP telephony might be fairly simple, using minimal applications or just using the technology in one location. But as enterprises become more adept at using the technology to its full potential, their ability to manage it diminishes. “Increased use of the networks means they become more complex,” says Gareiss. “You might have more sites coming online, or you might be considering the addition of IP video or unified messaging. Using more real-time applications onto the same network means you’ve got more applications contending for finite resources: the same amount of bandwidth but more applications competing for it.”

Another contributing factor is that people’s expectations of technology have increased considerably over the past few years. When many companies first deploy VoIP it is usually a concentrated, localized usage, usually in a firm’s headquarters. “Firms will start adding on regional locations, then extra branch locations, so they’re dealing with a lot more end-users than they were originally,” says Gareiss. “Our research is increasingly showing that it doesn’t matter where an end-user is located, whether they have a home office, whether they’re at a small branch office, whether they’re at headquarters or at a regional location. Their expectations for the application and the network performance are almost identical now. You’re still going to have the highest expectations at the headquarters but the gap between that and the home office is pretty narrow now, whereas back in 2000 it was quite large.”

Being able to carefully manage the different facets of IP telephony is clearly an important issue. As well as having to accommodate increased numbers of end-users in disparate locations, managing the system becomes increasingly difficult as an enterprise’s use of the network becomes more complex. It is at this stage of IP telephony usage that firms will start looking at their PBX tools or their existing network tools and realizing they can’t get the levels of control that they want. “A lot of times we talk to companies who say that IP telephony is great and fine to manage internally until there’s a problem,” says Gareiss. “In some cases they can’t drill down and get the levels of detailed control that they need. In other cases they can get the information, but it’s stored in so many different databases in the management tool that the tool itself becomes really cumbersome. They have a really hard time isolating where problems are coming from and trying to identify root causes, so they decide to look to a third party who do this for a living and have them deal with it instead. It makes more sense, because third-party management are up on the latest monitoring tools and understanding what potential causes are.”

This drilling-down into the infrastructure has proved to be crucial in the successful monitoring of a system. Visibility through the service levels can provide greater understanding of a problem, which is more efficient than using a traditional network monitoring tool. When looking at a probe, for example, all you will see at that point is network performance, so you will only see issues on the carrier side. “But if there’s something inherently wrong with the handset itself, or with the power feeds that are set for the users using the IP telephony system you’re not going to see that on a probe or a regular network tool,” Gareiss points out. “If you want to look into what’s going on with your voicemail, find out why you are getting delay, why you are getting poor sound quality. You may find the network is the problem, but it also may be in the call server itself, or in the handset, or in the software that runs that call server. Without this increased visibility you’re not getting the level of detail you need to examine what the problem is.”

Third-party management can also offer the increased facility of predicting potential problems, as well as examining existing ones. Despite the fact that many enterprises initially think they can manage their networks, Gareiss understands why they eventually look to outside specialty providers: “A lot of people go into IP telephony deployment thinking ‘OK, we’ve done a baseline network assessment, we’ve done some testing, we’ve done some capacity planning, we’re done with that now, we’ve got the network up and running, it’s going great.’ But what’s the first rule of networking? Nothing ever stays the same. Change is constant.”

For any enterprise, stage two of getting the IP telephony network running successfully must be to accommodate changes on the network. It is a given that the usage of the network will change, and enterprises must be prepared for the ongoing monitoring and testing that this necessitates. “You don’t want to be the person managing the telecom network when the CEO is trying to make a call and is experiencing packet loss,” explains Gareiss. “So this idea of passive monitoring and active testing is important. You need to be running simulations, seeing how different modes are going to affect the overall performance. You even have to be thinking about different business activities that could be happening, particularly in the financial services space. If you’re a major broker then any news in the financial markets could affect your stock market activity. You’ve got to be prepared for that. You’ve got to be able to do some modeling for those situations and be able to put in a contingency plan with the click of a few buttons.”

This can prove problematic for financial institutions trying to manage their networks internally, when staff are not specifically trained to deal with VoIP or other real-time applications. Gareiss confirms this: “What we have found is that roughly 40 percent of IP voice implementations are run by people with data management backgrounds, while 30 percent are run by people with voice management training. The rest is a combination of both, sometimes it’s one of each, sometimes it’s outsourced.”

And this can be a problem. “The fact that the mix is more heavily weighted towards people with data backgrounds running the voice network is a concern if the company doesn’t also have some people with telecom backgrounds, or if that data person isn’t trying to get cross-trained,” Gareiss argues. “We’ve also found that if you’ve got both voice and data experience you’re probably going to get a 15 to 20 percent premium on your salary because a lot of companies are looking for individuals with both backgrounds.” If you do not have experts on staff with traditional voice experience who can understand how to engineer voice traffic on a data network it is easy to see how problems can arise.

There is also limited potential to train staff in this field. If a member of your staff has a background in managing data it is becoming difficult for them to learn how to run a voice network and get traditional telecom training. For staff with backgrounds in telecom, it is easy to get training in the management of data. For Gareiss this is a unfortunate yet inescapable scenario. “Look at the seminars at universities or training institutions that are on offer, what is their focus? It’s on new technology. That’s where the R&D dollars are being placed. That’s where you see everyone heading. You don’t see institutions deciding to train on old PDM technology that none of the vendors are investing any of their R&D dollars in.”

And what does the marketplace look like in terms of the bigger management service providers? “Some of the bigger IT service providers like IBM, EDS, CSC and Orange are starting to move into the IP telephony space offering management services,” answers Gareiss. “We’re also seeing some movement among companies like AT&T, Sprint and Quest as well. Companies are also increasingly looking to regional specialty players, like Dimension Data. There are many smaller, regional players that are offering these types of services. What else we’re seeing is companies using or considering the vendors themselves, at least in the assessment phase.”

As use of an enterprise’s network becomes more complex it certainly seems to make sense to outsource the management to a specialty provider. The outsourcing of departments like IP telephony seems to Gareiss to be a signifier of things to come: “We’re going to see more companies looking towards managed service providers. That’ll be one way forward. IT staff will try to determine what things can they effectively outsource, and what they want manage internally. Telephony is an aspect of business where you have to really keep up with the latest changes, problems and issues, so it is are better to outsource to somebody who deals with that fulltime. Then you can take those experts internally and leverage them by showing them your technology, asking them how you can use it to make your business run better, make more money, more profit, and so on. So you really need to get the IT team thinking more strategically from more of a business sense.”

There are other trends in the market that Gareiss points to as indicative of the need for third party management providers. “The PBX vendors see the management market as a key market for them but they also recognize that their inherent tools are weak and not sophisticated enough. They’ll either have to hire people, develop better tools and sell them to make money, or they’ll acquire some of these specialty providers and integrate their technology into their PBXs.”

From a buyer’s perspective, the fact that each vendor might have well-developed tools seems less relevant since the industry is moving toward a multi-vendor environment. This is the most significant thing happening in the marketplace at the moment, according to Gareiss: “There is definitely going to be a place for these third-party management providers because they can give you one tool that allows you to manage multiple vendors,” she says. “That’s really important. A lot of these vendors started off being able to manage a Cisco environment, because in terms of market share Cisco was a leading IP telephony vendor for so long. Now you see a lot of Avaya implementations taking place. So because you see so many companies using – for example - Avaya in the context center and Cisco for all other IP telephony communications, you will start seeing management vendors providing a single interface for both Cisco and Avaya. Then a lot of companies might start using Nortel or Oftel - which is really strong in Europe - so vendors will want to add those in. Ultimately you want to have a tool that can support all of these single vendors. In terms of trends moving forwards we will be seeing more and more of that. More and more multi-vendor support.”